Stephen Daedalus

Yesterday was Bloomsday and I didn’t get a post in about it. Below is an excerpt from chapter 2 of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Borrowed with appreciation from the link in the title.

(Please forgive the awkward thought and prose. Draft!)
Quote:

This spirit of quarrelsome comradeship which he had observed lately in his rival had not seduced Stephen from his habits of quiet obedience. He mistrusted the turbulence and doubted the sincerity of such comradeship which seemed to him a sorry anticipation of manhood. The question of honour here raised was, like all such questions, trivial to him. While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. These voices had now come to be hollow-sounding in his ears. When the gymnasium had been opened he had heard another voice urging him to be strong and manly and healthy and when the movement towards national revival had begun to be felt in the college yet another voice had bidden him be true to his country and help to raise up her language and tradition. In the profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father's fallen state by his labours and, meanwhile, the voice of his school comrades urged him to be a decent fellow, to shield others from blame or to beg them off and to do his best to get free days for the school. And it was the din of all these hollow-sounding voices that made him halt irresolutely in the pursuit of phantoms. He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.

A common premise: Irish lit can be read in a post-colonial light. Irish writing and culture are in part a reaction to colonialism. The language of reaction is one of resistance, irony, and defining oneself in difference to the colonizer. It is a language of the Other.

Exile, silence, and cunning . . . enough said in relation to Joyce.

A further premise: The language or insight of post-colonial theory can accurately describe “Othered” individuals generally. Immigrants, first and second-generation individuals, all types of social marginals, liminal professions like priest or police officer.

Still a further premise:
Liminal, marginal, and colonized individuals are observers. The detached observer is relatable to the writer, in fact a very liminal vocation.

Joyce’s narrator, Stephen Daedalus, displays an alienating power of observation. This sense of alienation is related to competing cultures: the British colonizer and more importantly the Irish colonized. This “cultural hybridity” often leads to a confusion or skepticism about either culture, and its values. As a result of his cultural situation, and as a very intelligent individual able to analyze his experience, Stephen witnesses sometimes competing admonitions of his culture and interprets them in relative terms. The social code and behavior within it, the expectations--all are relative, indeed, even pretense. Stephen has a critical perspective and distance from himself, and others, and his (dual) culture. As a result, he displays that mistrust of genuineness that many colonials and biculturals suffer. Purportedly, relativism can be empowering: One has the opportunity and perspective to make informed and independent choices. In reality, relativism often just means viewing any code or value or behavior as convention, and pretense.

For example, Stephen’s rival displays a “quarrelsome comradeship”, which describes a form of common social interaction, a convention of interacting, the template of playful quarreling to indicate friendship. Stephen sees the form of the interaction, or rather sees through it, and can therefore not inhabit it. Instead, he is left with the defense of “quiet obedience.” Quietude is a rejection of convention, a defense of personal truth against ingenuineness, and a defense against pretense. Quietude also is often hostile, the unwillingness to humor someone or something, or to commit oneself. It can be an act of personal arrogance.

The pretense can be manifold—form itself as pretense, and content surely. These two are not comrades, but “rivals,” and this episode resonates with Stephen’s larger battle with the pretenses of Irish culture and history itself: the religion, nationalism, and class consciousness that he is famously trying to escape. In fact, they are not really even rivals, because Stephen isn’t committed. He finds the “question of honour here raised was, like all such questions, trivial.”

To show this idea in a related way: Joseph Conrad has had similar if more overt explorations of pretense and the Other. Marlow’s fascination with Lord Jim, and Kurtz, in large part has to do with the realization of the pretense and arbitrary conventionality behind belief systems and social codes. Those who stupidly or willfully participate in pretenses—moral, social, political, religious—arouse the sensation of rejection and disgust in the Other, who has been forced, either through shortcoming (Jim), or through intelligence and honesty (Marlow), “to look into the heart of things.” Ultimately what we are talking about of course is the loss of center. As Conrad concludes, without any absolutes, what is left is the virtue of honesty, specifically emotional honesty. “Those who do not feel do not count.” We are at sea, and emotional engagement with the truth of this is better than the affront of pretense, especially willfully embraced and perhaps inflicted on others.

It may be ironic to emphasize feelingin Stephen, but he is displaying emotional intransigence in the creation of his own identity. And in his “identity creation and maintenance” he is using strategies that are at once very Irish and post-colonial in nature: standing apart, and especially defining oneself by what one is not: Defining oneself in terms opposites, in this case both from Irishness and, in reality, from interaction.
The appeals made to Stephen, “the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things,” are clearly presented in an ironic way to undermine them.

Stephen’s true pursuit involves avoidance of interaction, and cultivating his personal “phantoms” in his quest to define his identity. “He gave them ear only for a time but he was happy only when he was far from them, beyond their call, alone or in the company of phantasmal comrades.” Cultural voices in various forms are “hollowsounding” and produce only a “din.”

In summary, a rejectionist attitude, and a critical faculty, possibly result from a (post)-colonial situation, and describe the experience other types of outsiders, like writers. An Irish writer like Joyce is therefore twice the outsider.

Perspective and bicultural experience can produce a sensation of “ingenuineness” (or hollowness) or the sensation of fakery in interactions, or in embracing a set of values or behaviors.

Ingenuineness can lead to the consideration of the relative and arbitrary nature of any behavior, or social or moral code.

The Other (in this case, Stephen) is left with little alternative other than silence and aloneness in order to escape this sensation of ingenuineness. Isolation is preferable to hypocrisy. The logical next step is of course, exile.